Can Spelling Checkers Help the Novice Writer?
Renu Gupta · British Journal of Educational Technology · 1998
This paper argues that one type of text analyser—the spelling checker—can help non‐proficient writers. 16 students in a Singapore classroom wrote compositions by hand for one month; the following month they composed their compositions directly on the computer. Observations of students' composing behaviours and a comparison of the lexis used in two students' hand‐written and computer essays show that students use the spelling checker for two functions: (a) word‐correction, in which they locate and correct some of their spelling errors, and (b) word‐generation, in which they use the spelling checker to generate words that are in their receptive but not their productive vocabularies. The spelling checker benefits those students whose initial writing ability is poor and whose writing is blocked by an emphasis on the mechanical aspects of writing.